Fingerprints offer an infallible means of personal identification. That is the essential explanation for their having supplanted other methods of establishing the identities of criminals reluctant to admit previous arrests.

The science of fingerprint Identification stands out among all other forensic sciences for many reasons, including the following:

Has served all governments worldwide during the past 100 years to provide accurate identification of criminals. No two fingerprints have ever been found alike in many billions of human and automated computer comparisons. Fingerprints are the very basis for criminal history foundation at every police agency on earth.

Established the first forensic professional organization, the International Association for Identification (IAI), in 1915.

Established the first professional certification program for forensic scientists, the IAI's Certified Latent Print Examiner program (in 1977), issuing certification to those meeting stringent criteria and revoking certification for serious errors such as erroneous identifications.

Remains the most commonly used forensic evidence worldwide - in most jurisdictions fingerprint examination cases match or outnumber all other forensic examination casework combined.

Continues to expand as the premier method for identifying persons, with tens of thousands of persons added to fingerprint repositories daily in America alone - far outdistancing similar databases in growth.

Worldwide, fingerprints harvested from crime "scenes lead to more suspects and generate more evidence in court than all other forensic techniques combined.

Other visible human characteristics change - fingerprints do not. In earlier civilizations, branding and even maiming were used to mark the criminal for what he was. The thief was deprived of the hand which committed the thievery. The Romans employed the tattoo needle to identify and prevent desertion of mercenary soldiers.

Before the mid-1800s, law enforcement officers with extraordinary visual memories, so-called "camera eyes," identified previously arrested offenders by sight. Photography lessened the burden on memory but was not the answer to the criminal identification problem. Personal appearances change.

Around 1870, French anthropologist Alphonse Bertillon devised a system to measure and record the dimensions of certain bony parts of the body. These measurements were reduced to a formula which, theoretically, would apply only to one person and would not change during his/her adult life.

To your doubt as to why left hand thmb impression of males and right hand impression of females is taken, I would say it is to identify at the outset that whether the person signed is male or female.

right mr. parveen,the query is about the provision of law. is it that all the fingerprints of 10 fingers of a person is always the same? Can fingerprints tell that a particular finger print is a male's fingerprint or female's?

Mr. Gupta, I may make my query more clear. In the Courts and Government Offices whenever a male has to put his thumb impression, he is asked to make LTI (Left Thumb Impression) whereas a female is asked to put RTI (Right Thumb Impression). Why is it so?